Volume 10 Page 07

This is exciting news, at least for me–I hope some of you care too: I just finished my final (for now) edit of my weird epic fantasy novel The Unlit Sea. It’s got evil gods, vat-grown hierodules, baffling organic technology, and a thrilling (I think!) pulp adventure plot. There is at least one fungus monster. If you like The Water Phoenix King, I’m pretty sure you’ll like The Unlit Sea.

So what I need right now are beta readers–people willing to read the current draft and give their thoughts on it. That includes basic stuff like word choice and grammar, as well as thinking about the novel’s structure, characterization, pacing, and overall organization. If that sounds like something that might interest you, please email me (moochava@gmail.com) and I’ll send you a copy of the novel.

It reminds me of a D&D campaign a friend ran where one of his cultural inventions was that elves consider questions to be extremely rude, like cursing and farting at the same time at a society party. In their culture if you want information you are supposed to make a declarative statement of interest, like, “I wonder why the sky is blue,” near the person who might, days or weeks later, decide to explain.

Of course this was the same world where a circle of druids was feeding babies to a Lovecraftian swamp cult because helping them was preferable to allowing some other, indirectly-related apocalypse to happen and the most helpful guy the party ever ran into was a blasphemous necromancer who simply saw animated corpses and wielding dark magicks as an expedient use of available resources.